Andy Bechtolsheim Aims for Zero Latency at Arista

The Register covers Andy Bechtolsheim’s keynote in London this week at the IP Expo. The Sun co-founder, now Chief Developer and Chairman at Arista Networks, said that the company is now in a race to eliminate latency in it’s switch devices.

Bechtolsheim is a speeds-and-feeds guy, and wants humungous numbers when talking about bandwidth and throughput and ports – and microscopic ones when talking about latency. He says Arista is in a race to zero latency. That is what’s needed in high-frequency financial trading where “every micro-second counts”, he says. Eighty per cent of all stock trades are computer-initiated, says Bechtolsheim, and having computer trades that are faster than anyone else’s requires the lowest latency network.

So how do you get to zero latency? You anticipate the movement of data before it’s needed.

As we covered here in our recent story on high-frequency trading, financial markets have a real need for speed that translates into competitive advantage. Arista switches already have some of the leading performance specifications in the industry, and if anyone can deliver on the promise of zero latency, it would be Andy.

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